Autonomous Path Planning

Tags: innovate, control, and think
Personhours: 2

Autonomous Path Planning
By Abhi

Task: Map Autonomous paths

Ahhhhhhh! Rover Ruckus has been around for a while now and it's time to figure out our autonomous plans! This year's autonomous is a lot more hectic than last year's since there is the detaching from the lander component which can take an unknown amount of time right now. That cuts down the potential speed for the rest of the auto but only time will tell.

Until then, I can only dream of the potential autonomous paths our robot can take. First, we need to know some basic facts. One, the field is the exact same for both red and blue aliance, meaning I don't need to rewrite the code to act on the other side of the field. Second, we have to account for our alliance partner's autonomous if they have one and need to adapt to their path so we don't crash them. Third, we have to avoid the other alliance's bots to avoid penalties. There are no explicit boundaries this year for auto but if we somehow interrupt the opponent's auto we get heavily penalized. Now, with this in mind, lets look at these paths

This path plan is the simplest of all autonomi. I assume that our alliance partner has an autonomous and our robot only takes care of half the functions. It starts with a simple detaching from the lander, sampling the proper mineral, deploying the team marker, and parking in the crater. The reason I chose the opposite crater instead of the one on our nearside was that it was shorter distance and less chance to mess with our alliance partner. The issue with this plan is that it may interfere with the opponent's autnomous but if we drive strategically hugging the wall, we shouldn't have issues.

This path is also a "simple" path but is obviously complicated. The issue is that the team marker depot is not on the same side as the lander, forcing us to drive all the way down and back to park in the crater. I could also change this one to go to the opposite crater but that may interfere with our alliance partner's code.

This is one of the autonomi that assumes our alliance partners don't have an autonomous and is built for multifunctionality. The time restriction makes this autonomous unlikely but it is stil nice to plan out a path for it.

This is also one of the autonomi that assumes our alliance partners don't have an autonomous. This is the simpler one of the methods but still has the same restrictions

Next Steps

Although its great to think these paths will actually work out in the end, we might need to change them a lot. With potential collisions with alliance partners and opponents, we might need a drop down menu of sorts on the driver station that can let us put together a lot of different pieces so we can pick and choose the auto plan. Maybe we could even draw out the path in init. All this is only at the speculation stage right now.